Students turn 'sticky, smelly' waste into school supplies

Published 8:00 pm, Wednesday, April 21, 2010

NORWALK

By DANIELLE CAPALBO

Hour Staff Writer

One child's nonrecyclable trash is another child's treasure at three Norwalk elementary schools working with a New Jersey-based company called TerraCycle to transform waste -- from potato chip bags, juice pouches and candy wrappers -- into school supplies.

"It's sticky, and it's a little smelly, but it's much better than having it go into a landfill," said Susanne Bryer, a parent who coordinates the TerraCycle "brigade" at Rowayton Elementary School. There, children focus their energies on drink pouches a la Capri Sun, though TerraCycle offers 27 other specific collection programs for the likes of energy-bar wrappers and coffee bags.

Since 2009, Rowayton has collected 12,743 items. West Rocks Middle and Jefferson Science Magnet schools began working with TerraCycle more recently and have collected 2,632 units and 3,555 units respectively.

According to company spokeswoman Lauren Taylor, TerraCycle uses items that cannot generally be recycled to make products like backpacks, pencil cases and homework folders.

"Right now, we're working with turning some of the broken-down materials into plastics for more industrial uses," she said.

Taylor said TerraCycle products are available at Wal-Mart this month.

TerraCycle was founded in 2001 by a Princeton student named Tom Szaky to manage a different kind of waste, she said.

"He would get leftover food from the dining hall and feed it to worms," Taylor said. "The worms would produce compost, which he would liquefy. It made great fertilizer."

The company still sells fertilizers.

As incentive for its national collecting programs, Taylor said the company pays 2 cents per item. Collecting parties usually donate the funds to a select cause, and Bryer said the $255 her school has generated will go toward Rowayton Reads, a project that aims to put more books in every classroom.

"We'll probably have enough to supply one grade level," she said.

Bryer said she launched the partnership in early 2009 when her daughter Emma Mulligan was in first-grade. Bryer heard about the program through another parent and soon took to the cafeteria, trying to wrangle the nonrecyclables herself.

"It was slow-going," she said. "When Christine Smith, a Girl Scouts troop leader, said, 'We need a program because we have to complete (a mission)?' I was like, 'Do I have an idea for you.'"

Since then, the collection process has evolved to a science. Before leaving the lunchroom, students discard their waste in one of a series of buckets color-coded for recyclables, drink pouches and standard-fare trash.

"It's cool, because we're making the Earth better," said third- grader Liz Mulligan, Bryer's eldest daughter. "Also, what was once going into a landfill becomes a new product."

Bryer said her next mission is to promote waste-free lunch.

"The whole thing is, for kids, once the garbage gets put in the pail, they don't know where it goes. They don't care," she said. "I want them to realize this is our satellite (planet) that we're on for just a little while, and we have to take care of it."